


Semantics

by thehobblefootalchemist



Series: their fathoms dim and winding [1]
Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Contains references to violence and suicidal ideation but those are canon so, Gen, I could watch entire movies just about them and this is my love letter to that, I've just been fascinated by Ilsa and Lane ever since Rogue Nation, Other, and Fallout gave me such a wealth of new material I had to do something with it, for twenty years I've been invested in this fandom and this is my first work for it, so this is a heap of indulgence and not being able to help myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 06:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobblefootalchemist/pseuds/thehobblefootalchemist
Summary: He is able to gather that the absence of the IMF techie seems to be the only noticeable deviation in how the house had been before.  That, and Ilsa, who had shot him, fought him, and stabbed him, was choosing to be in a room with him alone.--It takes time for Ethan to be located after the events of Fallout.  In it, Ilsa Faust and Solomon Lane have a conversation.





	Semantics

Ilsa Faust is speaking to him.

He registers this only dimly at first, as a fact detached from himself rather than something he ought to actively engage in. Since the moment the plutonium had dropped from the neutralized device most of his sensory awareness had receded into the muffling and ever-more-familiar territory of a dissociative state. It is, then, surprising—for multiple reasons—to find her voice intruding on this.

Resigned to the renewed cognizance he cracks open an eye and casts it about (because even with no intention of physically moving the muscle memory of the mind is inescapable, and so many years of _case the room case the room, where are the corners where are the hiding places where am I and who is in here with me_ will not allow for any lapse). He is able to gather that the absence of the IMF techie seems to be the only noticeable deviation in how the house had been before. That, and Ilsa, who had shot him, fought him, and stabbed him, was choosing to be in a room with him alone.

He listens to the flow of her speech rather than her words. Only when there is a lull does he venture to speak himself. “If I might ask you to repeat your key point, please…I’m afraid I haven’t been all the way here this past while.”

She is sitting far enough from him that he can see the detail of her face, but even if she hadn’t been he would have won money betting on her emergent glare. It pulls him further back into reality, the anticipation of conversationally circling one another a warming effect against the apathy that had settled into his bones. He had not thought to be bestowed such a thing before some nameless force came to lock him away again.

Interestingly, her only response is “Never you mind,” and nothing more. His brow twitches at that, the slightest flicker of movement that he controls before it becomes a furrowing. A wily opening gambit, that—she is either testing him, trying to provoke him, or (the option that digs under his skin the most) had assumed he was unconscious and had been saying things of note that he has now missed.

He is already invigorated. How he wants to step closer to her, to have his glasses and be able to take in every undercurrent of her expression as they dance this dance of theirs. He wants a warmly-lit Austrian hotel room. He wants chill winter air in a cemetery half the world away.

Somewhere in the back of his head he still wants to be dead, but he disregards this for now.

And so he stares languidly back at her, reading what he can of her body language. Clasped hands and her seated position make him suspect she is hiding an exhaustion tremor. Not a stretch that she would have one, after such physical exertion and stress, not to mention her partial strangling. If he cared about such things anymore he would be bothering to hide similar symptoms. As it is, he merely rolls sideways so he can keep their eye contact without furthering the building crick in his neck.

That is one of the skills she has that he appreciates the most: she is a watcher. The number of people that have cowered in his presence exceeds triple digits, and in spite of this and everything that has happened between them she can look him full in the face. Even when he had actively used his capacity for intimidation, during those moments when they’d near been breathing each other’s air, he could count on only one hand the number of times that she has flinched from him.

She shifts in response to his prior movement, a subtle coiling that relaxes only when it becomes clear he intends nothing further. Still that calculation lingers, however, that analytical narrowing her gaze would acquire when she was puzzling out a problem.

A look of genuine, if vague, good humor touches his own features, and he prompts her. “Yes?”

\--

Solomon Lane is smiling at her. She suspects he is little aware of this fact, and means well by it even less.

He is trussed up right where they’d left him before stepping into the outside air for a much-needed breather, but has now shed the state of seeming unconsciousness that had lain upon him when she had sat down in the only remaining unbroken chair. She is torn: she wishes Benji had not gone in search of Luther and medical assistance in the same stretch of thought that she is fiercely grateful he has removed himself; simultaneously she laments that she will not do the same herself in the same breath that she resolves to stay exactly where she is.

Her surface-level pragmatism accepts this as the logical fulfillment of the need for someone to guard him. Beneath, lurking somewhere in the marrow of her bones, is the craving for a more personal fulfillment, one she knows she is likely never to get.

For what type of _closure_ could one expect to come across when dealing with this man? He could answer her every question right here and now and she knows, knows it with the fatalism her life has taught her to wear like a tailored coat, that somehow the world’s turning will conspire to toss him into her path again somewhere down the line. MI6 has not allowed her to move on from him, and likely still will not even after she throws him at their feet.

Some of these thoughts had become murmurings without her knowledge, and were what he just has interrupted with the rasp of his own voice.

He is still looking at her, waiting. Rankled at everything and especially at having been caught out, she is acerbic. “How’s your leg?”

His chin tips a little. “Stings some,” he says. “The bottle you got me with was very stout.”

That he is engaging with her obvious subject change, and casually to boot, is insulting, but it is a hole she has dug herself. _Talking with him, isn’t it always?_ “I’m sure someone will see to it eventually. There is plenty of medical equipment here, after all, because of you.”

“Physical health isn’t high on my list of concerns.”

He means it. She is familiar with every tic his face can perform, and there is no deception in his current indifference. In the past hour she has seen him wild, seen him vicious, as he fought for the fruition of his plans, and even briefly glimpsed him desolate in the moments he realized it had been ripped from him. To go from that, to near as nonchalant as he was on the night following Turandot…

As a pair they are an exercise in phrasing, she realizes with a jarring wave of clarity. The difference between being _prepared_ to die and being _ready_ to die.

 _How long have you been suicidal?_ she almost asks him, and does not.

“You didn’t warn Walker that Ethan was coming after him,” she says instead, quietly. “And you stayed outside long after they were gone.”

He ponders her for some seconds. When he responds his voice is equally muted. “True statements.”

 _And what of them?_ his eyes inquire after, glacial-crevasse blue settled unblinking on her face. It is a palpable weight, as is the knowledge that at this distance he can see her perfectly.

“Withholding information seems a waste of your two years of planning,” she points out. “To let something like that go in the final minutes.”

“Walker is a schoolboy.” The pitch and scratch of the words is dismissive. “It is immaterial to me whether he lived or got himself killed after leaving here. He outlived his usefulness the moment he proved himself both rash and easily duped.”

So her first point was just a matter of him not having known of the detonator flaw, then. Her weight shifts, her hands re-clasping one another. The next thing she has to say sits poised on her tongue for nearly ten seconds. If Walker was a schoolboy… “What am I?” _What am I to you?_

His silence stretches even longer than hers, and in it her mind teems with every insight that has come to her since the first moment after everything that she had room to think: _You had no practical motivation for staying out in the open. There is no other reason to have done so but for the fact that you knew I would find you. You went to the trouble of stashing the bomb in this house and yet you_ wanted _me, you wanted_ me _, to find you. And not to kill me, but to hiss harsh nothings in my ear._

“You’re Ilsa,” he finally says, and it is almost something soft.

\--

He can see that she does not know how to take this, which suits him well because it is not something he will straightforwardly give. The plain and yet profound scope of it is something he will entrust to her autonomy, to either pick apart or leave be as she sees fit, and at her own pace.

Her bottom lip warps as she briefly chews it. “Even under the impression we were all going to die regardless, you tried to murder Benji.”

“I did.” And he is bitter about that failure, too, oh yes.

“And yet I get a knock to the head and a binding to a chair.”

There is a peculiar sort of accusation in her tone. He waits for her to expound.

“You all but swatted Walker as a bothersome fly when he had _outlived his usefulness_. But I thought I had, as well? Given the explosives at the café and your orders to have me shot.”

The diatribe carries years’ worth of incensement, and they have spent enough time in each other’s presence that he can hear the chords of confusion too. “An impulsive command,” he admits. “I grew to be glad that it didn’t come to pass.”

“Glad,” she repeats, deadpan.

“Glad.” Again he longs to be upright, to be nearer to her, so that they could circle one another like fellow predators should. To see her jaw set like it had when he’d approached her in the golden lighting of that suite. To stroll side by side trading glances and challenges in echo of their burial-ground rendezvous in their shared home city. “And as early as that very same night, in fact. You recall when I was bidden to ‘meet’ the IMF—my bullets cracked the glass in front of every one of them. I never aimed at you.”

His gaze has bored into hers, willing her to understand the gravity of this, and he is rewarded by a veritable reel of restrained expressions as she cycles back through her memory and cannot raise disagreement. Still, her answering remark makes an attempt at laconic. “And I’m meant to take this as flattering.”

It causes him frustration that she doesn’t recall her own words. “‘If you’re going to kill me,” he reminds her, “then do it yourself.’ You made your preference quite clear. And I haven’t deviated.”

At this, she blinks. Something has registered for her, and he watches her process whatever it is. Her stare moves to the floor. She breathes in, out; a quick intake, a slow exhale. She leans back up again.

“In two years, you haven’t ever sent anyone after me,” she says, still not looking all the way back at him yet.

“No,” he agrees, allowing the word to hang. Afterward, gratification that his point has come across nudges him into sharing something else. “And as a matter of potential interest…I was already living by your edict by the time you confronted me about it after the opera. Any time during your tenure with the Syndicate that I sent another member against you, I wholeheartedly expected you to kill them. Presuming anything else would have been an insult to you and your skill as an operative.”

“…you don’t want me dead.” Not a question in itself, but rather a realization that is causing questions.

“In point of fact I want _me_ dead,” he replies dryly. “Something which, I might add, you’d given me reason to believe you were in agreement with.”

\--

There is a sensation, phantom recoil of the shot in Paris. Her eyes stray to his maimed ear. An injury that he’d reportedly made not a sound for, to the point where his shroud had needed to be ripped away to affirm that he was still alive. The first and only thing that had moved him to speech in that car, apparently, had been the sight of _her_.

“There are easier ways to accomplish that than by dragging everyone else along,” she says, faintly, the remark filler more than anything while she processes what they have just discussed.

“Unfortunately I am burdened by my convictions. It causes me distaste to think of leaving this world in a way that doesn’t put the mark of my cause upon it.”

She isn’t going to try to unpack any of _that_ , and in any case, she has just recognized that he’s avoided addressing her non-question. And she doesn’t necessarily want to ask, hates that she even has the impulse to ask, but perhaps there is a streak of masochism in her. They are looking each other in the eyes again. “Why haven’t you made a direct attempt on my life?”

Between them the quiet stretches, delicate and inscrutable as a spider’s thread. There is auburn in his beard, and gray, and rope-burn at her throat.

“You still have my curiosity,” he murmurs by and by.

She cannot help bristling. “I don’t want anything of yours.”

It is his turn—the first time in their conversation—to look away. “…we’ll both always carry pieces of each other, I think.”

His voice does not carry the current of callous self-satisfaction that she has such a good ear for. It comes across only as a cautious assessment of fact, and what is almost too much to bear is that she cannot say he’s wrong.

“The last time we spoke face to face I seem to remember having your impatience, not your curiosity,” she says, aiming for glib but only achieving strained.

Though she’s sure he caught it, he blessedly seems to have no remark upon her tone. “Back then I was in a position where I could afford to be impatient. With things how they’ve been, I’m sure you can imagine that I need such points of focus to occupy my time.”

“So you’re saying that you often concern yourself with what I’m doing?” Skepticism lifts one brow toward her hairline.

“Can you blame me?” His query is candid. “You must know, you have to know how fascinating your choices are. Especially so after your break with our mutual former superior.” He shifts an inch forward, a spark in his stare, a brightness as he whispers, “Wasn’t it enjoyable to watch that wretched man pushed from his pedestal to burn?”

Discomfort curls in her gut. Atlee had indeed been a terrible handler, and a worse human being, and what she’d caught on broadcasts of his public tearing-down…it would be dishonesty not to admit she’d savored it with as much vindictiveness as vindication.

But even through that something else is needling her, something about the way the subject has turned that feels significant. She goes still when she pinpoints it.

Ethan had given her an account of Lane’s conduct while in their captivity. He’d been in turns stoical and bitingly passionate, and one of the claims he had uttered with the most vehemence was that he didn’t care what people thought or felt. Everything she is seeing now stands in direct contradiction to that. The sum of all her observations from their interactions past, in fact, point to him being a man who is deeply invested in picking people apart. Even discounting his machinations for ruining Ethan’s life, she herself stands as a monument to that…

Unless, it occurs to her suddenly, she falls into a different category than the general populace. ‘The woman’, that’s who she’d become during the window he’d deemed her expendable. And now…

_(What am I?_

_You’re Ilsa.)_

She is on the edge of a kind of wilderness entirely different than that which lays outside the house. It is within the realm of possibility that she might take the mental step into it one day, might at some point in the future feel inclined to chart its potential depths. But not now, and not here. Not with the man concerned bare yards from her. 

This retreat from epiphany is slow, steady, and witnessed in its entirety by him.

“No,” he says to himself, little more than a breath. “I can’t be blamed.”

She scrapes together something that could pass for composure. “There’s plenty for which you can be.”

“Hence my being paraded around the world in chains. But that’s a wearying subject.” He is taking his own steps backward now, hushed earnestness folding back into the facsimile of dispassion that she knows so well.

Unheeded by either of them, a mournful bray of wind comes down from the crags.

“Speaking of wearying…” He gives something like a chuckle. “You came down on me very hard earlier.”

“Fighting for people’s lives does tend to make someone go all-out.” _Not that you would know._

Her flat response brings forth a smirk from him. “We both know that your strength was drawn as much from animosity as nobility.” Each syllable of ‘nobility’ snaps with derision. “On a related point,” he continues, utterly off the cuff, “that seemed to make you reflexive. Predicting your move-pool wasn’t difficult.”

She is thrown by this topic shift. “To what are you referring?”

He shrugs as well as he is able. “We’ve all got our favored tricks. You used yours not only once but twice, and the second time it only worked because you’d stabbed me.”

He is speaking of her body-climb technique, she realizes, of her propensity to utilize her legs in close-quarter combat—which he is completely right to call reflexive. High-stress situation or not she depreciates herself for using something on him which, she has just recalled, she has in the past given him a front row seat to.

He has, clearly, the same occasion in mind. “One of the better aspects of a lifelong lack of…inclination, shall we say. The ability to pay far more attention to a person’s fighting habits rather than the figure they cut in their formal wear.” He gives her an up-and-down look that seems genuinely unconscious. “No matter how lovely.”

The wind howls again, closer-in this time. It fills the silence in a way that she, with a locked throat, is incapable of.

Only when his eyes move away from hers, settling on a point just over her shoulder, does she realize that for the second time in her life she has missed the approach of another individual because the world had shrunk down to only him and only her.

Benji is in the doorway, one hand resting on its frame. “They’ve found Ethan,” he tells her, quietly. “He’s alive, and they’re flying back with him now. Someone’s coming along to relieve you of him.”

Without looking at him he inclines his head minutely toward Lane, who for his part remains motionless and says not a word. She acknowledges Benji’s news with an appreciative murmur and lets him know that she’ll be right there. He gives her a nod, and then a kind of unhappy glance, before he goes. It is evident that being back to the erstwhile site of ground zero has made him uncomfortable, and somewhat distressingly not evident how much he might have overheard.

She looks back at Lane only one time as she stands and makes ready to follow her friend. Her lack of haste is purposeful: to show any of her joy or relief for Ethan’s safety would be tantamount to salt in a wound, and the cost-benefit price of that is too high for her to pay. She makes do with the thought of being able to bask in the sunlight of one of Ethan’s smiles soon, and the hope that it will chase away a few of the shadows she will carry with her out of this dark room.

It is when her foot is half out the door that he says it: her name, just once. Against her better judgment she meets his gaze again, and finds it sober.

“I want you to know about a thought I had, when you had that rope to my neck,” he says. The lasting mark from it is visible, a near-perfect match to hers. “You looked as if all you wished was to finish what you tried in Paris. And it struck me that that wasn’t so abhorrent a thing.” He is yards away, and yet it is like he has managed to lean close to her again, is sharing this from a distance of inches. “If a hand is to take my life other than my own, the most fitting on this earth is yours.”

Her feet are rooted where they stand. She wants to laugh. She wants to break something, like whatever intangible thing has just broken somewhere inside her chest.

Because that is him, isn’t it? A man who could still win, even beaten down and bleeding and having nowhere to go. She has been mollified in the matter of not killing him only because no one could take away her idle fantasies about doing so. But now she cannot even have those. Not with each one tainted with knowing he would welcome it.

“Fare well, now,” is the last thing he tells her, the sentiment sounding for all the world as though it’s meant. She tells him nothing back.

\--

Even long after she has disappeared from his sight the effect of her presence has not faded from him.

Later, he will let the spite seep back in—use his vendettas as something to drown out the unending interrogations, while away the time until he can successfully remove himself from the playing board.

But for now he does not need to call upon his loathing for Hunt and the wider world stage. Right now he has a little bit of Vienna again; has been given back some of that London graveyard. When he closes his eyes, he can almost see the headstones.


End file.
